Widow beaten to death in Crestmoor home

He said the crime had frightened Crestmoor residents, who suspected they were being targeted because so many elderly residents lived there.

Jeffrey Goldfogel said he always believed that the killer had to be someone his mother knew. Otherwise, he reasoned, there would be no motive to brutally beat her to death.

“I’ve always believed it was somebody she could identify,” he said.

He said he suspected that unsavory friends of her housekeeper may have met her at the house and believed the 4-foot-11 woman was an easy target.

She had repeatedly mentioned how shady her housekeeper’s boyfriends appeared to her, he said.

Homicide detectives believed the murder could have been committed by someone who staged the attack to look like a burglary.

Police were optimistic that the task force would find Surle Goldfogel’s killer, but after four months passed, her family offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. The reward is still being offered, Jeffrey Goldfogel said.

Authorities investigated whether there was a connection to subsequent attacks in the neighborhood, including the beating of 82-year-old socialite Muriel Phipps with a club in her garage on Feb. 2, 1998. Phipps’ husband, Gerald, had once owned the Denver Broncos.

Although officers arrested 20 suspects for other crimes who fit an FBI profile of a “short-tempered” loner in his mid-20s, none were ever linked to Goldfogel’s murder.

The killing was so senseless and unprovoked, Jeffrey Goldfogel said.

Surle Goldfogel’s husband, Leon, who had owned Ace Mercantile Co. and established Imperial Distribution and Craig Distribution, died in 1995, two years before she was killed.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.